An Astonishing Admission by a Leading Scholar on Who Jesus and God Are?

Dr. Murray Harris wrote a full study on God and Jesus in his famous Jesus as God (Baker, 1992). On page 47, in footnote 112, we find this shocking, but to us exciting admission:

In the mind of the author of Hebrews, “It was not the Triune God of Christian theology who spoke to the forefathers by the prophets. That is to say, for the a uthor of Hebrews (as for all NT writers, one may suggest) ‘ the God of our Fathers,’ Yahweh, was no other than ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (compare Acts 2:30 and 2:33; 3:13 and 3:18; 3:25 and 3:26; note also 5:30).

Such a conclusion is entirely consistent with the regular NT usage of o theos [God]. It would be inappropriate for Elohim [GOD] or Yahweh ever to refer to the Trinity in the OT when in the NT theos [GOD] regularly refers to the Father alone and apparently never to the Trinity .”

I trust that readers will share this candid admission with everyone. Talk about it far and wide. This Trinitarian scholar documents the amazing fact that “GOD” in the Bible never refers to the Triune God. This of course is because neither Jesus nor the prophets norany of the biblical writers were Trinitarians! They would all therefore be unwelcome in contemporary churches.

This needs to be pondered and acted upon with all urgency. Are we not to be judged by our belief and practice of the words of Jesus? And what was the creed of Jesus? He believed in the God of Israel, his own God, and nowhere in his teaching did he speak of a Triune God. And that Triune God is conspicuous by his complete absence from Scripture.

The declaration of Jesus is our judge: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” Jesus affirmed this central, fundamental guide to Christianity, agreeing with a Jewish scribe who echoed Jesus’ words, “there is no other besides Him,” the One God and Father. Jesus enumerated one Lord, not two or three. Jesus claimed for himself the special oracle given to David in Psalm 110:1 where God is clearly distinguished from “my lord,” the Messiah. The Hebrew word here adoni (not Adonai!) refers invariably (all 195 times) to a non-Deity superior, the king or other authority figure, or very occasionally an angel.

Ponder the fact that in churches belief is based on allegiance to a God who “exists in three Persons.” That Triune God is found nowhere in the Bible though there are 11,000 occurrences of the various words for God: YHVH, Adonai, Elohim and Theos.

Jesus must be allowed to determine the definition of the only true God, and he defined Him as the Father alone (John 17:3). Jesus was the begotten (=brought into existence) Son as 1 John 5:18 (not KJV) states, along with Psalm 2:7, Psalm 110:3 in many Hebrew manuscripts and the LXX, and Luke 1:35 and Matthew 1:20 (“begotten in her”). The Father is the “begetter” in I John 5:1 Greek philosophically minded “church fathers” lost themselves in a morass of complex, technical non-biblical jargon, asserting that the Son was “man but not a man” and that as Son he had “a beginningless beginning.” Invite your pastor to preach on these issues, comparing this strange non-language with the lucid words of Gabriel defining quite explicitly the meaning of Son of God in Luke 1:35.

The church departed into a crypto polytheism when it ceased to believe that the Son of God came into existence (=was begotten) by miracle in Mary. Reading the Son back into a pre-human, actually non-human existence as “God the Son,” God was turned into two (and later three).

Jesus ceased to have his origin in the human family. He was dressed up as man, but not really man, and therefore not the Messiah of biblical expectation. Jews naturally took fright at this disturbance of the monotheistic, unitary creed of their ancient heritage, shared by Jesus. Muslims reacted also against this odd “three in one” God. And so vast blocks of humanity were, and are, set at odds with each other.

Revival means a return to the teaching of Jesus, his Gospel about the Kingdom and his rock solid belief in the one-Person God of Israel and of Scripture. It is that God, the God of Jesus , we are to love with all our hearts. A compromise is unacceptable when it comes to the words of Jesus. Jesus’ complaint with the religious authorities of his day was their failure to pay attention to his teaching and claims. The ever-present danger was and is “tradition” mounted against the words of Scripture. The vice-like grip of the status quo in church tradition requires a miraculous deliverance for those in its clutches.